A group of MIT students won DARPA’s $40,000 Network Challenge by being the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, red, 8-foot weather balloons at 10 fixed locations across the continental U.S. The team accomplished the goal in just less than nine hours, sorting through tons of misinformation floating around the Internet on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.

The Washington Post reports that the winning team, headed by post-doc Riley Crane, set up an information-gathering pyramid that assigned each balloon an award of $4,000, the first person to spot one $2,000, and less money to people who referred the various informants down the chain. The team will donate the rest of the award money to charity.

“The Challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world,
is rich with scientific intrigue, and, we hope, is part of a growing
‘renaissance of wonder’ throughout the nation,” said DARPA director,
Dr. Regina E. Dugan, in a statement. “DARPA salutes the MIT team for
successfully completing this complex task less than 9 hours after
balloon launch.”

The Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s
Network Challenge set up the competition in celebration of the 40th
anniversary of the Internet. The agency cast the challenge as a way to explore how the
Internet–and specifically, social networking–affect wide-area team
building, and the ability to solve broad-scope problems within a set
amount of time.